The Power Of Posting

It's of some interest to me that, thanks to the data collection of Google Analytics, I can see how this blog and The Studio Has A Few Notes compare in terms of traffic. I've heard differing opinions voiced, over the year+ that I've been blogging, as to what drives up hits when you're not a well-known site (like Neil Gaiman's blog, for example). The three main camps (that I'm aware of) seem to be:

• blog a lot,
• comment on other blogs a lot so that others will follow your link back to your blog, and
  
• post about topical subjects so that you'll show up in popular searches.

I imagine there are others. I'm just not well-versed enough in these matters to know about them.

What I've noticed, in comparing the two publicly-available blogs to which I contribute, is that the first theory seems to correlate most to the results. When The Studio was getting a healthy number of posts, and in fact my own production here was down as a result, the home of movie and TV reviews was out-hitting Kimota94's Place by about 10 - 20% over just about any period. Over the past several weeks, though, as my volume here has returned to 'normal' (averaging about two posts per day), while The Studio has tailed off to about thrice-weekly, the advantage has gone the other way, almost exactly (around 20% higher here than there).

Of course, it could still be something else at work, like content matches that are being favoured (or ignored) by popular searches. I'm sure there's a certain amount of magic (just not the 'real' kind) involved. But as someone who reads other peoples' blogs, I've similarly found that my tendency to visit them eventually settles into a frequency somehow proportional to their tendency to do updates. So I guess it all makes some sort of sense.